Open Loop Report “Artificial Intelligence Act: A Policy Prototyping Experiment”

This week we are publishing a new Open Loop Report from our program in Europe on the AI Act. The report presents the findings and recommendations of the first part of the Open Loop’s policy prototyping program on the European Artificial Intelligence Act, which was rolled out in Europe from June 2022 to July 2022, and in partnership with Estonia’s Ministries of Economic Affairs and Communications and Justice, and Malta’s Digital Innovation Authority (MDIA).

Through a combination of mixed research methods, we tested several provisions of the AI Act with participating companies. In this first phase of the program, 62 participants from over 50 AI startups and companies operating in the EU shared their feedback on selected articles of the EU proposal, commenting on their clarity, feasibility and cost-effectiveness. Inputs were gathered on a weekly basis via the Open Loop Forum, an online platform for discussion around a variety of topics, including the taxonomy of actors in the AI lifecycle, risk management, transparency, data quality, human oversight requirements, and regulatory sandboxes. The overarching goal of the exercise was to test whether the AI Act could fulfill its goal of promoting trustworthy AI while at the same time being feasible for companies. In this way, we were able both to gather feedback and to observe how companies interacted with provisions from the AI Act, giving us an idea of how they might interpret some provisions in the future when they have to comply with the regulation.

We want to thank in particular Henrik Trasberg, Legal Advisor on AI and New Technologies, Ministry of Justice of Estonia; Ott Velsberg, Government Chief Data Officer, Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications; Kenneth Brincat, CEO, MDIA; Ian Gauci and Gordon Pace, Advisors, MDIA.

We are particularly thankful to all the speakers and participants of the Open Loop Program on the EU AI Act kick-off event for informing this report through their excellent contributions: Dragoş Tudorache, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and co-rapporteur of the AI Act for his opening keynote; to the panelists Evi Fuelle, Global Policy Director at Credo AI; Horst Heitz, Chair of the European Steering Board at SME Connect; and Karine Perset, Head of AI Unit and OECD.AI at OECD and to the more than 80 attendees that participated in the event.